Kundalini Splendor

Lawrence Edwards: Awakening Kundalini (book from Sounds True)


If someone were to pick up a rock, put it in your hand, and ask you if it was real or not, you’d likely say, “yes, it is real!” without hesitation and probably wonder why a person would ask such a question. The ordinary mind, our ego mind, is almost always certain that it knows and understands basic reality—but being so convinced that we know something, as unconscious and unintentional as that attitude may be, makes us blind to all that we don’t know. Holding on to that rock, the ordinary mind has no sense that the stone is 99.99 percent empty space, and what is perceived as a rock is actually pure energy bound in that form! The same can be said of the one holding it.

Cutting through the blindness of the ordinary mind, cutting through ignorance and the pride-of-knowing delusion, requires a force of wisdom beyond the closed mind’s tangle of ideas and beliefs. Cutting through the mind allows us to directly know the highest truths. One term for that force of wisdom and ultimate knowing is Kundalini. Kundalini is a Sanskrit yogic term for the unimpeded power of wisdom, transformation, and revelation inherent to us all. It is the power of universal, unbounded Consciousness as the potential for the individual to know all that lies beyond the confines of the mind and body while discovering a new vision of the mind and body revealing hidden dimensions with unimagined clarity.

The term Kundalini translates quite literally as “the coiled one” and symbolically points to our innate potential power of consciousness, which is represented by a coiled spring or a snake, ready to be unleashed. The unfurling of Kundalini’s power occurs through the process of Kundalini awakening, which releases the power of Infinite Consciousness to impact the mind and body in countless transformative ways. It unleashes the power and potential of your mind and body to function at their very best. More importantly, from a yogic perspective, this power, your power, opens experiences of boundless love, compassion, wisdom, and grace. Ultimately Kundalini brings you to the highest state of consciousness possible.

The aim of this book is to support people on their path of spiritual awakening, regardless of the tradition they follow. Kundalini is given different names in different spiritual traditions Holy Spirit, Chi, Sophia, N’um, Saraswati, Tara, Prajnaparamita, bodhicitta, and many more—but the power of grace, revelation, and transformation to which these terms point is one and the same. Each language has its name for gold, but gold is always the same substance. All spiritual traditions speak of the power beyond the mind that draws one through the profound process of transformation and revelation to the very source of the highest wisdom and boundless love. That power, in the yogic tradition, is known as Kundalini.